How to effectively advertise on Facebook or Instagram?

The easiest way to advertise on Facebook and IG is via Live video. Follow the 3 Es: Educate, entertain, or enlighten. Teach your audience, make them laugh or wow them, or enlighten them with a story about you. If you do the Live video on Faebook and you stay under 10 minutes, you can download and upload it immediately to IGTV, instagram TV. You an then cut up the video with a free app (Inshot, iMovie, etc) to upload 20-second teaser clips into FB and IG stories with a call to action to watch the whole video. You can use a shortlink from LinkHero or Bit.ly to make the link to your full video easy to remember. Once you do the Live video, you can boost the post or run targeted ads. Hope this helps!

Trish made some excellent points in her answer! I’d add to it:
- no tactics matter if you’re not segmenting and targeting the right audience
- use the FB pixel for retargeting
- be sure to integrate all your marketing tools to work together. Like our own body’s health, each individual healthy action we take is multiplied when incorporated in a wholistic approach. Same is true for sales and marketing.
Schedule a free call with me if you’d like me to walk you through any of this stuff and more. Message me for the VIP complimentary link.

1.The best way is to entertain your audiences.
2.Be active on your page and frequent post.
3.Let your audiences understand what you are doing.
4.Give them the necessary asnswers to their questions and respect each and every one.

First we need to address the terminology:

Tecnhnically "advertise" means using Facebook Ads, but you can advertise something on Fb or Ig with a post and getting organic engagement.

Effectively doing the second (organic engagement), is every day harder due to the content overload on social media and the reduction of users attention. Every year we have less seconds of attention available to conquer our ideal target.
Some of the advices you got from the others will help: you need to create content that is relevant for your audience, engage, educate, inspire.
Videos work better than anything now and of course a decent copywriting helps too.

Using the actual advertising tools, which means using a budget and trying to reach a bigger audience, can't be explained in a few tips, there aren't quick tips to apply especially if you never did.

Focus on who you want to see your ad and on what they see, so once use as advertising medium a content that is relevant, engaging and inspiring, choose the target carefully, be clear, honest and transparent and...read Facebook rules: advertised posts have a lot of strict rules to respect in terms of topics, language..
for example on your FB or IG profile you can talk about weed freely but you can't advertise anything related to it.

The most effective way to advertise on instagram and facebook is an irresistible offer. Dont have any irresistible offer ideas? Go on groupon and you can find proven deals that people are going crazy for.

Then just duplicate that deal to a facebook/ instagram advertisement.

The reason this works so well is because people love deals and if people actively SEARCH on groupon and purchase the deal then if you use the power of Facebook ads to put the deal right in a targeted audiences face that would benefit from the deal you will see crazy results.

Whether you are trying to just build a list, you name it, it works. I use this with all my clients and I have had countless times where we started the ad, spent $100 and they got so much traffic and customers that they had to turn it off. Seriously try it...

Everyone is saying use your pixel, use look alikes but bottom line even though they are effective you can't use it if you don't have data. 90% of you don't have pixel data to work with.

So if you use this method get tons of leads and traffic and then use the data to then create a look alike or retarget (once you have atleast 1000 of the event you want to use) you will kill it on Facebook advertising.

This depends on the type of audience you're targeting, but I have three general pieces of advice.

1. Test Your Content. No one has a magic bullet that works 100 percent of the time, but if you do A/B testing with your content (this should happen on all marketing efforts, not just Facebook or Instagram), you'll succeed more often than not. Run the same copy with two different images. Take the same engaging video for two posts, but ask a question in one and give a call-to-action in the other. Look at your analytics to see which one is working better and put more resources behind that.
2. Utilize Instagram Stories. They're an easy way to engage with people outside of your followers, even if you don't put any money behind it. And if you DO put money in your stories, you can effectively link to a product or service right there in your story (you can do that without paying if you have at least 10,000 followers already). Pro tip: Write several relevant hashtags but hide them behind a gif or emoji. People will still be able to access your content via those hashtags, but your image won't be covered with text.
3. Keep your brand voice. So often I'll see a brand that's fun and jovial on their posts, but then their ads read as stiffly as a ventriloquist's dummy. This is your chance to get your work out in front of a wider audience, but don't lose what makes you unique.

Hope that helps – best of luck! Happy to answer any additional questions.

There are countless methods you can use to grow your brand on both the platforms.

There's been a spate of bots and growth services (see more here: https://www.growthboost.co/blog/buzzoid-review/) getting shut down by Instagram and, at times, they can also affect your account.

Here are a few of the best strategies for organic growth on Instagram.

Partnering with other accounts to do cross-promotion. This was referred to as S4S in the past but with Instagram limiting views, it may not be as effective today.

You can run a followers campaign depending on your budget but just know that it takes quite a few followers to make a meaningful impact and you may be better off focusing on organic growth channels.

Upload consistently. Of course, everyone knows this but try and aim for every other day at the least. Once a day if you can. It's social media so things move fast.

Focus on an intermediate action. Instead of buying now, it may be better to run a direct response lead gen campaign.

Videos are still getting great reach on the platform. Stories are even better. If you can get in your IG stories every day then you'll be in a really good position to engage with your audience and drive meaningful revenue.

If it can't be you then get a dedicated person to do it for you. Try to mix it up. Engagement posts like polls and the lifestyle your business champions should be more prominent than advertising focused content.